Many people throughout the world are required to administer liquid drops into their eyes for a variety of purposes, such as, for administering medication to control or prevent disease, to reduce inflammation, to reduce intraocular pressure, to supply liquid tears, etc.
Current practice involves dispensing the liquid from a container dropwise into the eye of the patient by squeezing the container.
However, particularly in the case of older and disabled people, accurate dispensing of the drops into the eye of the patient is unreliable. Often such patients are unsteady in holding the eye drop dispenser, have difficulty in tilting their head back or must lie in a supine position to allow the placement of the eye drop into the patient's eye. Frequently, more than one drop is dispensed and commonly the drops are not dispensed into the eye but land on the patient's cheek resulting in widespread wastage. In the case of very expensive medications, this is costly. In brief, standard squeezable eye drop dispensers for medications or liquid tears typically dispense more than one drop when the container is squeezed and often miss their target.